Chapter 478: Circling
“We’re unfamiliar with this area, so we’ll need you to help guide us,” Jin Diao said as he handed a high-powered telescope to Song Xiao, pretending not to notice his odd behavior. He himself held another, scanning the terrain below.
Song Xiao accepted it and began observing the buildings and landmarks on the ground, softly directing their path.
This wasn’t familiar territory. At high altitudes, it was easy to veer off course, and the plane could only fly a few hundred meters above ground. Its loud hum echoed across the quiet surroundings, like a monster intruding into a different world, attracting the attention of all nearby living things.
Lu Weiyi’s psychic sense quickly detected the probing of nearby creatures. Even without his warning, it was easy to see mutant birds flapping toward the aircraft.
“Enemy attack incoming! Sun Kai, defend the left wing! Zheng Hong, the right! Li Ze, cover the rear! Meng Huan, take the front! Lu Weiyi, protect the body of the aircraft!” Jin Diao quickly issued combat orders, tailored to each member’s ability.
“Roger!”
“Understood!”
…
As soon as the orders went out, Lu Weiyi enveloped the entire aircraft with his psychic power. Through it, he could see how the chaotic aura outside rapidly adjusted.
On the outer shell of the aircraft, countless sharp, tiny flying daggers formed, constantly orbiting within a three-meter radius of the wings. At the tail, unknown vines twisted and danced like serpents, moving so fast they were nearly invisible—only the sight of mutated animals being whipped and falling gave away their presence.
Slender fire dragons moved as if alive, igniting the feathers of the approaching birds. Within moments, they were reduced to balls of flame falling to the earth, the high temperature acting as the perfect accelerant and igniting a field below.
“Zheng Hong, fall back! Ai Ping, try to put out the fire!” Jin Diao quickly reassessed. Fire-types were too destructive in midair. Earth-types were less effective here, and for a moment, there was no one suitable to fill the gap.
It revealed a flaw in their team’s composition.
“Xu Sa, take over,” Lu Weiyi ordered, just as the section Zheng Hong had left was overwhelmed by a dense swarm of brightly colored mutated birds, crashing toward the aircraft like suicidal missiles.
Inside, everyone gasped. If those birds crashed directly into the chopper, even a few hits could seriously damage it. In this world, aircraft were irreplaceable—nearly as valuable as human lives.
Just then, the birds suddenly vanished within two to three meters of the aircraft—layer by layer—as if the whole craft was surrounded by an invisible barrier.
Everyone occasionally glanced at Lu Weiyi, who sat calmly in his seat. Compared to the others fighting hard against the enemy, he simply sat there quietly, eyes slightly lowered as if lost in thought.
This was the first time they had seen such a vast amount of psychic power materialize. The mutated birds, by sheer number and force, made it visible to the naked eye.
Seeing the brightly colored birds unable to approach, everyone on the aircraft breathed a collective sigh of relief, gaining a bit more confidence in the journey ahead.
Xu Sa came closer and, seeing the scene, didn’t rush to use his powers for support. Instead, he looked outside with great interest and leaned in to whisper to Lu Weiyi, “Well? How’s it looking? How many so far?”
Lu Weiyi didn’t respond, but his mental energy instinctively glanced into his storage space. The half where time stood still was packed with various grains, vegetable seeds, and other perishables. Recently added were heaps of brightly colored bird corpses, densely piled like a small mountain.
They were frozen exactly as they had been when stored—eyes wide with rage, wings spread, beaks twisted into vicious snarls, looking ready to tear someone apart at any moment.
With his increased level, Lu Weiyi could now even sense their bodies still faintly warm, their hearts burning with heat, frozen in that suspended time.
He decided that when releasing them, he would need to find an uninhabited area. Just a few of them were several dozen meters in size—if they struggled, they could easily injure themselves.
Sensing that the number of mutant birds was starting to dwindle, Lu Weiyi’s psychic power expanded again to sweep the surroundings, collecting any nearby bird-beasts into his space. The cabin, which had been darkened by flapping wings, was suddenly bathed in light.
Barely a few minutes of rest had passed when tiny specks, like sesame seeds, began rapidly approaching from all directions. There were so many, it was impossible to see the end of them. They had thought the number of mutant creatures around Capital was already staggering—but now they truly understood what it meant to be naive.
“C-Captain…” Meng Huan’s voice trembled slightly from the front.
“All units, prepare for battle,” Jin Diao calmly ordered.
No one in the cabin spoke again. Even fire-type users Zheng Hong and Liu Rui, who weren’t supposed to join the fight, began readying themselves.
The flood of rainbow-colored birds completely engulfed the small aircraft. At first, you could still see their brilliant feathers through the windows, but as they pressed in, visibility dropped rapidly until even the people inside could barely see one another.
As the dim cabin lights flickered on, Song Xiao’s voice quivered, “I… I can’t see the ground. I can’t determine our direction.”
Jin Diao frowned. Their navigation systems were currently down—electronic instruments offered almost no accuracy. In unfamiliar territory, their only method of determining direction was by using binoculars to locate recognizable landmarks on the ground. That was why they had to fly low, even under constant attack from mutant birds.
“Every fifteen minutes, clear a gap for visual ground checks. Can you do that?” Jin Diao scrutinized Song Xiao suspiciously.
Probably understanding the urgency of the situation, Song Xiao nodded without objection.
As they continued flying southwest, the number of mutant birds increased. At first, the team members were able to carve out brief windows for ground checks, but the creatures soon surrounded the plane entirely.
Lu Weiyi’s psychic barrier, originally a dome around the aircraft, gradually transformed into a spindle shape to reduce direct collisions with the birds.
While Song Xiao had to rely on physical gaps to view the ground, Lu Weiyi’s psychic threads easily penetrated the mass of birds, allowing him to observe the terrain below in real time. He clearly saw the ruins of a once-mighty base.
Below was a base with towering walls, now crumbling. Zombies wandered aimlessly within, their bodies giving off a mechanical aura—like deactivated machines, stiff and mindless.
But the drone of the aircraft seemed to awaken them. Tens of thousands of zombies looked up.
Even without seeing their facial expressions, the eerie, twisting movements of their heads—like their necks might snap at any moment—were enough to make one’s skin crawl.
Lu Weiyi, who had been calmly observing with his head down, instinctively leaned back in alarm at the sight.
“What is it?” Xu Sa immediately noticed, knowing what Lu Weiyi was doing.
“How many people died when Xinghai Base fell?” Lu Weiyi asked quietly.
“…About 80%,” Jin Diao replied. At that moment, the air around the aircraft exploded into a storm of palm-sized blades, clearing a wide area beneath them.
The dense crowd of zombies stretched their arms toward the plane, some even using abilities to launch themselves skyward. As the plane pulled away, the zombies surged after it in waves, forming long streams of pursuit.
Everywhere they looked was a sea of the undead. They piled atop one another, forming human ladders scaling the tall base walls—tens of meters high. A single glance was enough to make one’s heart race.
“Only a handful of high-level ability users managed to survive,” Jin Diao said grimly.
“They were a very united base. That ending made it even harder for the other bases surrounded by zombies to trust each other again.”
If even a united base had ended up like that, it wasn’t hard to imagine what would happen if the rest didn’t unite. What awaited humanity then?
Maybe the people below… were a reflection of their own future.
Before long, the plane finally left the range of Xinghai Base. The zombies’ pursuit began to fade, and everyone turned their attention back to the renewed swarm of mutant birds.
The situation was worse than expected. Progress was rough. Overuse of abilities and poor visibility took their toll. At first, Meng Huan and Jin Diao still kept an eye out for landmarks, but as more and more team members became exhausted, their focus shifted entirely to providing support.
Lu Weiyi, while protecting the entire aircraft, also had to allocate portions of his mental power to fill in for gaps left by exhausted teammates. As a result, navigational control was left entirely in Song Xiao’s hands.
By the time Lu Weiyi realized that the giant tree below looked extremely familiar, night had already fallen.
“We’ve been here before.”
As someone used to being in a position of authority, even though his sense of direction wasn’t great and he wasn’t completely sure of what he saw, his tone was firm and decisive.
That certainty caused Song Xiao, who had been navigating the route, to panic for a moment. He reflexively denied it, “No.”
But compared to his usual timid responses, this answer was too quick and decisive, immediately drawing the attention of others.
“Captain, I think we’ve arrived…?” Xia Ming’s voice came through the earpiece from the cockpit, with a hint of confusion, shifting Jin Diao’s attention.
Jin Diao absorbed a crystal core with one hand and manipulated metal to open a visual window. Holding his binoculars, he looked down.
There was a barren circle of rock below, stretching several dozen meters with no vegetation at all. Slightly farther away, the trees on the mountainside looked no different from before the apocalypse. In a world where towering trees had become normal, this bare patch actually seemed out of place.
Night had already fallen, and continuing to fly would be unsafe. Xia Ming waited for Jin Diao to make the call.
Jin Diao only hesitated for a moment. “Prepare to land.”
“Roger that. Preparing—”
As Xia Ming responded, the helicopter began flying toward the designated landing area.
“Wait—”
Lu Weiyi began to object, but before he could finish speaking, a thick, winding vine suddenly shot out from between the trees with lightning speed. It smashed directly into the aircraft, shattering Lu Weiyi’s psychic barrier and slamming into the fuselage.
